Something to Declare (Pgs 241-300)

Summary:
The purpose of writing a new novel made her go from Vermont to Wisconsin. She went to a small town in central Wisconsin called Necedah, which means land of the yellow waters. She went there because she wanted to write a novel about Virgin Mary, and in there people were having apparitions of her. When Julia gives reading, people will come to her and recite stories and she would tell them to write it. But they will answer that they are not writers. Julia kept a yellow folder with different stories she has written. When the time comes to write a novel, book, or poem, she would go back to this folder to find inspirations and ideas to write her new literature. Julia has a certain time that she spends in writing from the morning to 2:00 in the afternoon. She decides to write it during the morning because her mind is out of worries and problem about her life. When she enters her process of writing, she explains that she disappears. If the phone rings or someone from UPS comes looking for Julia Alvarez, she would say to come back after 2:00 pm. This is because that was the time where she would get out of her circle where she only thinks about writing and she would become normal again. This was a problem for her family because they couldn’t call before 2:00 PM but they got used to it since it’s something that Julia enjoyed.

Quote:

“My advice is, if you are sorely tempted to try out a new adventure, go for it! Just don’t forget where you are headed, and knowing this will imbue that adventure with even more resonance and richness” (Alvarez 281).

Reaction:
Life is only one, and people have to make everything possible to enjoy it. Even if it is something dangerous or you know it will bring you problems, try it even if in the end you’ll regret it. At least you know you tried it. As the quote is stating it, if you want to prove something new, do it without thinking about what other people will say about it. But you always have to keep in mind why are you doing and what impact this will have in your life. It is true that when people want to try a new adventure, they are going to sit and think what impact this will have on their lives and wonder why they want to do this. It’s not like this but you have to keep in mind what this adventure is going to bring you to. To Julia, her adventure was to be a writer, but her parents did not want her to be that. She defied her parents and even thought she fell many times, she has to stand up by herself and do everything to be successful. At the end everything was worth because she became a famous writer that can share her stories to other people that are in the same situation that she was.

Something to Declare (Pgs181-240)

Summary:
Since the book is coming to an end and it is already in Part Two: Declarations, Julia decided to reveal her struggles as becoming a writer. In order to become a writer, Julia needed to have a job first to support her necessities. She lived most of the country because she would apply to any job no matter where they were located that interested her. Even though she needed money, she did not go to her parents because she felt that she has disappointed them several times because of her choices. Her mother had always told her that she needed to get a teacher certificate and that would make her life much better. But Julia’s truly passion was to write. Her mother told her that she could write during the summer but she did not agree with this. Even though she was not successful at first, she kept on writing and finding inspirations until the day in which she found what she always wanted; a triumph in publishing her books. Julia was considered a Vermont writer, everyone kept asking her why she decided to live in Vermont after she had live in the city. But she said that in Vermont she could concentrate more in her writing than living in the city where she was distracted by movies, parties, restaurants and different types of attractions. In Vermont, this was not the case, people were united; something that reminded her of her native country. Not only that, in Vermont, Julia had written her novels. It is true that she has written stories and poems in other states, but her revisions and publishing happened in this small state where she found the inspiration to write her literatures. One of her books was inspired on one of the most touching events that had happen in the Dominican Republic. This was the murder of the Mirabal sisters during the regime of Trujillo. This event was so horrifying that November 25, they day they were killed, was declared the International Day against Violence against Women by the United Nations. She traveled to the Dominican Republic and went to almost all the places where the Mirabal sister went, to find information about them. She even discovered something that she did not know about; there was a fourth sister and she was still alive. After 22 years of teaching, Julia decided to give up tenure and dedicate all her time to write. Even though she has made this decision it was hard for her to do it because she was started to feel homesick because the academy was her home in the United States.

Quote:
“In a way, I am, for a happy ending redeems the past and makes the struggles meaningful. Still, the shadow of the lean years falls n the present like dust motes in a shaft of sunlight even after a thorough housecleaning. After so many years living on the shaky side, you never quite believe what other people keep telling you, that you’ve arrived” (Alvarez 185-186).

Reaction:
When I read this quote, the first thing that comes to my mind is that sometimes you need to fail a lot of times in order to be successful. It is true that when someone keeps failing, they give up on themselves and start to feel disappointed thinking that they are not worth anything. Not only that, they also give up on what they have always wanted without thinking on all the things they have done to accomplish it. Sometimes it takes a long time for you to accomplish it but in the end everything you went through and everything you did is worth because you get what you want. In the case of Julia, it took her a long time to stop struggling with her writing, but she accomplished what she wanted by writing a lot of stories and poems until she wrote one that people were interested in and made her famous, and faithful in her writing. It is important that no matter how many times you fall, you always have to stand up on what you believe and be strong because someday you will get it.

Something to Declare (Pgs 121-180)

Summary:
In these pages, a new section is started in the book. This section is about what inspired Julia to be a writer. Even though she was inspired to be a writer since she was a child, it is not as easy as it sounds like. She spent a lot of time finding her voice, but this was hard since all of the reading she made had a male voice. This made it even more difficult for her to find a female voice that expressed her ideas and interprets her feelings. In these pages, she went back on time when she was a child and started to remember who were the people that she loved the most in her family. These people became her muses and help her find her voice and an inspiration for writing. Not only her family, but also her maids who spent most of her childhood with her and taught them a lot of things about her culture. She was most inspired by her Tias (aunts) who were Tia Rosa, Titi, and Tia Amelia, and also her maiden Gladys. But before she realized that these were her muses, she had always referred to the book The Thousand and One Nights, a book she read while she was a child living in the Dominican Republic. She used this book as her base to start her writing because she found a connection with the protagonist whose name was Scheherazade. This was because in the book this girl was stuck in a kingdom where females were unimportant, and Julia lived in a family in which female are told they are going to get married and have children and in a culture where boys were more privileged than girls. Finally, Julia found her voice not up in a tower in important places, but in the kitchen with the women that first taught her about service, passion, and singing as if their life depended on it during her childhood. But her problem was not solved when she found her voice and muses, now she didn’t have a vocabulary or context to apply in her writings and she didn’t want to imply her foreignness since she hasn’t see it before in any literature. But this changed one summer while she was a Bread Loaf where a poet stated that one could write poetry only in the language in which they had first said Mother.

Quote:
“In this new culture, my sisters and I had to find new ways to be, new ways to see, and–with the change in language–new ways to speak. It was this opportunity to create ourselves from scratch that led me to become a writer” (Alvarez 156).

Reaction:
Moving to the United States had a big impact in Julia’s life. Not only because of the fact that she had to get use to a new culture, but that she had to get used to the idea that she might never go back to her country again but she needed to be able to keep her roots and not forget where she came from. It was hard for her to move to a new country without knowing their language and more when she was discriminated and treated like an American servant class. This was because Latinos that didn’t finish school were working as maids in houses of American families. This made American kids think that everyone that was Latino was the same. One of the hardest things for Julia as becoming a writer in a new different language was the fact that in English there are different words for the same meaning. But even with all these impediments, and trying to fit into a whole new different culture, she was successful. It is true that she had failures and at times she didn’t have the support from her family, but she kept on going and became stronger in learning from her mistakes and getting up whenever she fell without giving up on her dreams.

Something to Declare (Pgs 61-120)

Summary:
Since Julia and her sisters stayed living in the United States speaking a new different language it was obvious that they will start to forget their native language or speak it with an accent and only know the basic words. Their parents did not want them to lose their tie to their native country, so they started to send them back to the Dominican Republic during the summer. Since their Spanish was full of English, they mixed both languages; the problem was that in their country their relatives didn’t speak English so they had to try their best in speaking in Spanish. Julia started to realize how far apart she has become from her culture until her first love during one of the trips to the Dominican Republic. His name was Manuel Gustavo but she used to call him Mangu after a mashed plantain dish that is a staple of Dominican diet. She started to see the gap when she couldn’t talk Mangu in a deeply way since her knowledge in Spanish wasn’t sufficient to express her feelings. In her late thirties she met her husband who was a farmer from Nebraska. On their first date, he invited her to dinner. Julia was a picky eater since her family didn’t like their children to eat in the streets because they could get a disease and they didn’t know who did the food back in their country. But this changed after they came to the United States because people could be put in jail for serving you something that made you sick to your stomach. When one of Julia's sisters became a mother, she felt some jealousy since she had depended on her writing and had never thought in the fact of becoming a mother and experience that beautiful feeling. Since her husband had already two daughters and was in his fifties, he didn’t want to have more children. When she told him about her desires he said that if that is what she really wants he will be with her. One thing about Julia's family in their country was that everything was based on family. But because they were in America it changed because in here adolescents are trying to find themselves while in their country their cousins were celebrating the quinceañeras and getting married at the age of 25 and having children. But this was different for Julia and her sisters because in America you don’t go by your family's past you create yourself anew.

Quote:
“The thing that had gone wrong with my sisters and myself according to the extended family back home, was that we had settled in the United states of America where people got lost because they didn’t have their family around to tell them who they were. Instead, they spent their lives, wandering around, doing crazy things trying "to find themselves"” (Alvarez 114).

Reaction:
When I read this quote, the first thing that comes to my mind is that people from other cultures don’t think people in the United States can live a civilized life. They are wrong because your manners come from what you see at home and if you have someone strong by your side that tells you what's wrong and what's right, you can grow up just like if you were in your native country. It is true that when your parents immigrate to here, they don’t have a stable mind and more when they have problems in the country where they come from. So it is hard for them to show their children how to be good adults by having fun but at the same time been civilized. Just because you live in another country other than yours it does not mean that you can’t celebrate your traditions and do things that your culture does in their natal country.

Something to Declare (Pgs 1-60)

Summary:

In the first part of Something to Declare, we can see what caused the protagonist and her family move to America. This was because during her childhood, in the Dominican Republic was a dictatorship led by Rafael Trujillo. In order to survive during this time period you had to get out of the country or live hidden in your house without making any bad comments about the dictator because it might cause your death. In the first chapter, we can see how Julia was indecisive on what she wanted to be when she grew up. She went from bullfighter, to a cowboy, to an actress but there was always some sort of impediment or characteristic that she did not have in order to be any of these. Until the end when she decided she would be a poet and everyone agreed with her. Julia has a very close connection with her parents since she calls them "Mami" and "Papi" which has a very strong connotation to describe their relationship. When it was the time to move to the United States, Julia and her sisters were really sad because they did not want to leave their culture and their country to get used to a new one. When her family was in New York, she saw that everything in this country was different from her natal one, and this made her think if the papers made her free of everything she loved back home. At first it was really hard for her in school since English was not her native language. Also because they were used to speak Spanglish which was not the same language spoken in school. As young teenagers in a new country Julia and her sisters started to think that they should change their look in order to fit in. So they started to watch the Miss America contest, after watching the contest they decided that they needed to change their look in order to look more American. Even thought they wanted to look like that, they did not fit in because of their skin color, their height and even their hair. But after that they realized that the late sixties were coming, and ethnic look, would be in. their classmates wanted to look exotic; they wanted to look like Julia and her sisters because of their culture.

Quote:

"It took some time before I understood that Americans were not necessarily a smarter, superior race. It was a natural for them to learn their mother tongue as it was for a little Dominican baby to learn Spanish. It came with "mother's milk," my mother explained, and for a while I thought a mother tongue was a mother tongue because you got it from your mother's breast , along with proteins and vitamins" (Alvarez 27).

Reaction:

This story is told in first person. When I first read this quote, I find a connection with the narrator of the book since we both came to this country at a young age and we had to get used to a new culture, language and new type of people. It is hard to understand a different culture and more when you had a different idea about who they were until you see reality and understand they are the same as you. Another connection is that both of us had to get used to a different language in which you only know the basic words, but when you get to the country it seems like nothing. As I read this quote, I also see that the narrator is using dual narrative voice. This is seen when she says "for a while I thought a mother tongue was a mother tongue”, because you can see the innocence in which she sees this phrase and how she interprets it. In connection to the story as a whole, this quote is important because we can see how she is getting adapted to this new country bit by bit in which she is going to stay the rest of her life. This is because of the situation in her native country in which she won’t have the same opportunities she is having in this one.